Mine
By Carol Rifka Brunt
There’s a small red barn on the property we live on. It belongs to the landlord, not us,
and it sits upfield from our house. It’s there, up the big long hill of unplanted field and then
just over the top edge so that from my bedroom window all I can see is the curl of a loose
bit of its tin roof and a tiny slice of its red side wall.
Other things that are not ours are the bricks stacked next to the landlord’s garage and
the two orchard ladders propped against the barn and the apricots that hang so luscious
and ripe on the gnarled apricot tree by the driveway.
Some things that are ‘ours’, as in my family’s, but not mine, are the line of seven
lipsticks and three bottles of perfume in the bathroom cabinet and the opera records that
my father loves and also his botany books and his small collection of red cricket balls from
his favorite games of cricket.
Those last ones, the balls, look like they’re all of ours, but they’re not. I know this
because I spent a whole week of after schools searching the overgrown field for one that I
threw in there. My father saw me do it and he boomed out to me from the front porch.
“You’ll be living in that barn if you don’t bring me back that ball...” He pointed up the hill to
the landlord’s barn as if it belonged to him, as if he had the power to move me in there. I
knew he didn’t, but still I couldn’t help feeling sick at the thought. I couldn’t help searching
for that ball like it meant my life. Like it meant survival. I don’t want to be in a place that isn’t
ours. I don’t want to find myself stuck out where I don’t belong.
Then there’s my mother. I watch her in the morning with a compact mirror dabbing
lipstick onto her parted lips. She’s in the kitchen when she puts on her makeup because
she says it has good light. It does. The walls are yellow and the fridge and stove are yellow
and first thing in the morning when my mother is doing her makeup and my father is
drinking his milky tea in the living room and the early sun is streaming in it feels like a
yellow heaven. Like me and my mother are on the sun or swimming in a lemon meringue
pie. She puts on her red lips and doesn’t even notice that the room is glowing. She doesn’t
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see that it’s just the two of us in that world. Every morning I reach out to kiss her before she
leaves for work and every morning she pulls back. “Don’t want to stain you with my lips,
Pumpkin.” She means that she doesn’t want me to smear her makeup. Her lips. Those are
her lips not mine.
Belle Moskowicz’s mother doesn’t wear lipstick. Belle leans against the school fence
when she tells me this. “It isn’t right to use what isn’t yours,” she says. “Do you know where
lipstick comes from?” she asks, one hand on her hip.
I wish I did. Belle Moskowicz asks me in a tone that makes me wish very badly that I
knew exactly where it came from. Then she tells me about cochineal. She tells me about
insects from the tops of cactus in Peru. She tells me about live pregnant females spread on
screens to dry. She makes smoothing motions with her open hands when she tells me this,
as if she could conjure those insects right there in front of me.
“And they all die,” she says. Then she looks straight at me and leans in. “And then do
you know what happens?” I shake my head. “Then they crush up all those millions of dead
bodies and put them in your mother’s lipstick. That’s what happens.”
I touch my own lips.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I am. That’s why my mother doesn’t wear lipstick or eat meat or wear leather
shoes. It isn’t right to use what isn’t yours.”
The red barn comes into my head and I ask Belle if she wants to come over on Friday.
“You can sleep over,” I say.
“Yeah I guess,” she says. “Whatever.”
My father’s day is constructed around a pyramid of beverages. He starts with milky tea
when he wakes up then moves to coffee, then ginger-ale. At lunch he has a glass of lager
and then moves back down through soda and coffee so that by the time my mother comes
home from work he is back drinking milky tea in a worn upholstered chair by the window.
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The chair is his own, but the shelves, where he puts his books, are not. They belong to the
house. The house sits on a small square of lawn in the corner of sixteen acres of woods
and fields. It belongs to the landlord, André, a ruddy French-Canadian who my father
watches through the window. André is on the property a lot. He drives a green tractor
around the perimeter of his acres. Lately he’s been plowing the field between our house
and the barn. He has an idea about a vineyard. That cricket ball will be found now, sliced
up by André’s tractor, barely red at all anymore.
One thing that used to be good about this place was the huge Lombardy poplar next to
our house. It was a wide feather-shaped tree that hissed in the wind. When the tree was
there nobody could see our house from the road. Nobody. Then André knocked on our
door one morning and told my father he was taking it down. He explained about plumbing
and root damage and the danger of falling branches. My father looked past him and
frowned.
“I wouldn’t go through the trouble if it was my tree...” he said, avoiding André’s gaze.
“Just letting you know, that’s all,” André said.
As I tied my shoes for school my father cupped my shoulder and turned me to him.
“It’s not up to us,” he said,” It’s not our tree.”
Then who are you? I wanted to ask him, but I didn’t.
My father watched for the next week as André took his chainsaw to the massive trunk. It
was so thick that he had to cut in stages, taking out chunks at a time. So thick that even all
hands joined, my whole family couldn’t have circled it with outstretched arms. Walking
home from school on the day it finally came down I saw our house standing naked and
exposed. From the road I could even make out my father in his chair by the window.
I invited Belle Moscowicz over because there’s something I wanted to show her. Also,
she’s the only one that talks to me in this place. My mother says it’s like that when you’re
new. I’m always new.
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My father is writing at the kitchen table when we get there. When he finishes this
dissertation he’ll have his third PhD. Those degrees belong to him alone. My mother
doesn’t want any part of them. My mother says she doesn’t mind earning the money. She
likes the insurance company. She likes having her own desk and her own stationary with
her own name at the top right under the name of the company. But she doesn’t want to
hear about my father’s studies. “That’s his thing,” she says. Or sometimes she smiles and
waves the back of her hand in his direction and whispers to me, “Whatever floats his boat.”
This time it’s botany that’s floating my father’s boat. He’s talked to me about his thesis
many times. He wants me to understand. Before dawn sometimes I walk with him on the
old railbed trail by the Okanagan River and he talks about ecosystems. He gets farther
and farther ahead of me until all I can hear is a word or two blown back on the wind.
“Knapweed” and “invasive” and then he bends down and picks a knapweed plant and
loosens its seeds with his fingers. He turns back to me as he throws them to the wind.
“This native grass doesn’t stand a chance.” Hundreds of barbed seeds fly off, covering a
grassy patch next to the river. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Elizabeth?” I nod
because I really do think I understand.
When Belle comes over I tell my father that we’re going out for a walk. He tips his pen
towards me without even looking up and mumbles something about fresh air. I stuff my
coat pockets with salted peanuts for both of us and crumple a plastic bag into the back
pocket of my jeans. André is just outside drilling holes in the stump of the poplar.
“Why is that guy right next to your house?” Belle asks me. She stares at him until he lifts
his head and gives us a weak smile and nod. I hate Belle.
“Why don’t you ask him why he’s here. I don’t know.” She stares at him for another
moment.
“Nah. Let’s just walk.”
But I do know why he’s there. He’s been doing the same thing for weeks, since the time
he cut the tree down. He drills holes into the stump and then pours poison into the holes.
He lugs around a big white jug with a pump and hose. Despite André, the Lombardy keeps
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trying to start again. Everywhere the roots run, slim shoots of new tree pop up—in the
middle of the lawn, on the driveway, clustered next to the original stump. André lops them
down with his pruners and then pours the poison into the main trunk. I’ve hidden the few
that grow near the house. One is right against the kitchen wall and I’ve propped my bike
against it so he won’t see. Another is in the front garden, hidden in the overgrowth of
weeds. I love the Lombardy poplar.
Belle and I walk up the hill. I hope André isn’t watching us because I want to take her to
the barn.
“Here, open your hand.” I pass Belle a fistful of peanuts. She pockets them and pinches
out one at a time to pop in her mouth.
“Up there,” I say, pointing at the barn.
Behind me, down the hill, I see André leaving. He grips the jug by its neck and tosses
it into
the back of his pickup before climbing in himself. For the rest of the afternoon the barn is
mine.
“What if something is already dead?” I ask Belle. “Then what?”
“Well, then, it’s ok… if it was natural, that is.” She looks at me as though she’s sure
whatever I will show her won’t qualify as natural.
“Well then, look at this, our own cochineal.” I drag a log over to the barn window so
Belle can see in. On every windowsill in the dusty barn are ladybugs. Piles and piles of
brownish red ladybug husks. Belle smiles, showing her gappy teeth. She tries the window,
but the paint is old and crusted and it won’t budge. We walk around the barn. Belle lifts the
padlock on the latch of the front doors then lets it slip from her hand. She scrapes her teeth
over her bottom lip.
“How about up there?” She points to a door that starts halfway up the side of the barn
wall. It snugs right up into the roof and has a small window at the top. There’s no door
knob, just a red door in a peeling white door frame.
“But how can we....”
“Well duh Elizabeth....” She lets her mouth gape open and rolls her eyes back. She
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points to an orchard ladder next to the barn.
“But…” I say.
She starts to spread the prop out and align the ladder with the high door. I need to tell
her that the ladder isn’t ours, but Belle doesn’t know anything about landlords and things
you shouldn’t touch. She grabs the legs of the wooden ladder with two hands like she’s
subduing an animal. Knapweed seeds cling to the hem of her jeans.
The newly plowed field is red in the late sun. Beyond the field, the sun reflects bright
orange off the windows of our house making it impossible to see if my father is in there
looking up at us.
“I don’t know Belle...” But Belle is already halfway up the ladder.
“Gimme here,” she says, patting her back pocket then reaching down to me. I climb the
ladder and hand Belle the plastic bag. “Come on,” she hollers.
I climb up behind her and brace myself as she leans back to kick the door open. In that
moment I know we can be seen from everywhere. We are high enough that with the poplar
gone we could even be seen from the road. My father said the barn looks like a silly nipple
at the top of the hill now. And here we are, two girls in the air, up where we don’t belong.
The door gives way easily with the force of Belle’s foot. She doesn’t even look back to
see if I am with her. She just leaps in, jumping the twelve feet like it’s nothing, like the barn
is her own. Inside there are stacks of dribbled paint cans, a chair that needs re-caning, a
wooden toboggan hung on the back wall. Belle’s frizzy hair has gathered a net of
cobwebs. She holds her bag open and slides her hand against the sill sweeping in the
ladybugs. She gives the bag a shake and reaches in to pinch out a few of the husks,
pressing them back and forth between her fingers. The sun is so low that everything
outside the barn is red and pink. Inside the barn is like a dark pit with Belle rubbing bugs
between her fingers.
My mother’s car is suddenly home. She drives fast and sometimes it feels like magic
that she’s there, a surprise that she’s back with us. She looks up the hill, her hand shading
her eyes. Her hair and skirt lit orange with the sun. She sees me up on the ladder and
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cocks her head to the side.
“No, this is not really me.” I whisper. I look at my glowing mother then back at Belle, who
slides a finger against her lips, spreading her cochineal on.
“So? How is it?” Belle smiles up at me, her full lips covered in the crushed ladybugs. I
shake my head.
“No. I don’t think it’s working.”
“What? What’s wrong with it?” My mother is walking up the hill towards me.
“I don’t think...” The ladybugs look like paint chips on Belle’s lips. In the dark of the barn
she looks freakish. Her narrow face lit by the slice of light shining in from the door. She
pulls a pout like a model and a few of the crumbs shake off.
“What’s not good? What?”
My mother is halfway up the hill, shouting my name now. The urge to run to her, to hold
her hand and let her lead me back to the house is something I could swim in, something I
could drown in. I look at Belle one last time.
“Here, take the bag, I’m coming out,” she says to me, but instead of reaching in to help
her, I slam the high barn door.
I hear her shout to me. “What are you doing?” Then, “It’s dark in here. Come on
Elizabeth...”
But that’s all I hear because after that I jump to the ground. I shove the ladder back
over to its place and I run. I go as fast as I can down the hill to meet my mother. A story
about baby birds and a nest on the barn roof tumbles from my lips and my mother believes
me. She reminds me that the barn is not ours but she believes every word of my story.
My mother holds my hand as we walk down the field. It is radiant now, smouldering red
in the sun.
“Are you ok?” she asks.
I tell her I am.
I think about Belle at supper. I think about her as I lie in bed with the lights off and the
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covers pulled over my head. I don’t want to check. I don’t want to know. At night the barn is
invisible from my window. Even in full moon it hides in the shadows of the trees behind it.
In my mind Belle is still in there, blind in that dark barn. Hungry and scared. I should bring
her a piece of my father’s spinach quiche. She’s my responsibility now. I fall asleep thinking
she’s mine.
At school Belle doesn’t look at me. Her arms are scratched. Her face is bruised. She
keeps away, turning her head when I’m near. Through the hallways and classrooms I hear
stories about Belle. All day there are stories. None of them true.
It’s drizzling when I walk home. André is on his tractor, his thin red hair plastered to his
head. Most times I ignore him, but today I smile and wave. I cross the field, my black shoes
sinking in the soft mud. Everything seems beautiful, indestructible. There are shards of a
cricket ball that will soon be wound up in grapevine roots. There are young strappy poplars
growing in the weeds. There’s a scratch on the red barn wall scraped in by a dragged
ladder. And further, down the road, partway to town, in a small white house, there’s Belle.
A girl who will always remember me. A girl I will always stay with, like a slim silver scar that
never quite disappears.
© Carol Rifka Brunt
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